What is the Atonement?

Sin is defined as disobedience to the law of God. Just as modern medicine has taught us that children of parents are more likely to get a disease if their parents had it, sin spreads from parents to children. Unlike our medical example, however, the chance of inheriting the disease of sin is 100%–an absolute certainty. Every single person is born a sinner. Furthermore, the irrevocable law of God states that the penalty for sin is death and eternal punishment in the afterlife. Every single person who is born is subject to this fate.

But God created human beings for eternal fellowship with Him. Man was created to have eternal life with God but chose to sin in the Garden of Eden resulting in this separation. We no longer could be in fellowship with God because his holiness requires those around Him to be holy as well. He could also not revoke his laws, as such an act would contradict his righteousness. J. Gresham Machen said the reason for this is that

“God would be untrue to Himself, in other words, if sin were not punished; and that God should be untrue to Himself is the most impossible thing that can possibly be conceived.”

Man thus needed a substitute to pay the price of sin since the justice of God demanded that a penalty be paid. The love of God provided our substitute in the form of His eternal Son, Jesus Christ. The work Christ did in his life and death to earn our salvation is known as the doctrine of the atonement.

To earn righteousness for us, Christ had to be perfectly obedient to God His entire life. If he had not done this, we would have no record of obedience we could use to earn God’s favor. This is sometimes called his active obedience. Christ also had to suffer for us, referred to as his passive obedience. This suffering lasted his entire life including opposition from Jewish leaders, growing to maturity, and the temptations in the wilderness and culminated in the pain of the cross. On the cross, He experienced physical pain and death, the pain of bearing the sin of the world, abandonment, and the wrath of God.

We must remember that the penalty of sin was inflicted upon Christ by God the Father. It was His justice that required the payment and the Son volunteered in our place. With this the Father received full, not partial, payment for our sins. The blood of Christ poured out and we then had hope rather than the dismay of knowing we could never live up to the standards of God. Christ was our penal substitute; he took the penalty that we deserved and we were thus made clean by His blood.

We deserved to die as the penalty for our sin but Christ died as our sacrifice. We deserved to bear God’s wrath against sin but Christ died as propitiation for our sins. We were separated from God by our sins but Christ “reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” (2 Cor 5:18) We were in bondage to sin and to the kingdom of Satan but Christ provided us with redemption from that bondage. Christ bore our guilt but He did not become guilty.

Our violation of God’s laws required our death. God’s love for us through the death of Christ gave us new life. God’s love for us allowed Him to take on the penalty for sin Himself. He took the punishment so we could reap the rewards. Machen explains:

“God’s the cost and ours the marvellous (sic) gain! Who shall measure the depths of the love of God which was extended to us sinners when the Lord Jesus took our place and died in our stead upon the accursed tree?”